


Angel of Death

by serenlyall



Series: A Galaxy of Shadows [8]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: heed the warning please, if that makes sense, it's not sugarcoated, it's not super explicit but it is there and it is...blunt, or the fact that it was happening, what happens happens and it doesn't shy away from talking about the fact that it happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:20:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23669812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenlyall/pseuds/serenlyall
Summary: Vader hears the screams in the Force, and though he does not know for certain what they mean, he suspects. He suspects, and when he walks into the detention cell to find Leia Organa caught in the hands of Stormtroopers, he will find that he was right.
Relationships: Leia Organa & Darth Vader
Series: A Galaxy of Shadows [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1704334
Comments: 7
Kudos: 54





	Angel of Death

**Author's Note:**

> So this is something of a companion piece to a fic I wrote like 5 or 6 years ago, called "father hear my cry (and may the demons guard you)". It's not *the* companion piece that I talked about at the end of that fic - rather, it's something of an alternate version of that story, where Vader doesn't swoop in in the nick of time to save her. This time, though, it's from Vader's POV.
> 
> Again, please heed the warnings on the fic. We do see the rape happening, though it isn't from Leia's (or her rapists') POVs, so it's not super explicit. 
> 
> This version is the version I'll be working with in future projects - projects that are set in the same universe. It's a very dark universe (or "possible way in which things went"), as this fic implies. Some of my older writings will be folded into this universe as well, but some of them will not be.
> 
> Lastly, I hope you enjoy!

There is a world—a destroyed solar system, a galaxy, a universe—where Vader reaches her in time. Where Vader finds her in the clutches of the men whose intent is dark and cruel and full of daggered lust and lightning wrath, whose hands crawl beneath her skirt and tear the sheer cloth from her shoulders, but get no farther than that.

There is a world—but it is not this world.

The door opens and Vader strides into the cell, and it is to find the young woman—the _girl_ ; he had realized, on the first day of her torture, that she truly was nothing more than a child, for all that she was Princess, Senator, and Rebel—held in the air between five men, while ten more watch, half of them still half-undressed. They are buried hilt-deep within her, the sounds and smells of sex hanging amid the aftershocks of surprise that follow in the wake of the opening door.

Vader lifts a hand—and it is over. The men fly to the walls of the room, the girl falls to the floor, and then there comes the sound of snapping bones and tearing flesh as the men’s throats crumple in on themselves. Blood runs from their mouths, coughed up by their final gasping, rattling breaths, before their eyes bulge and bleed as well, and the veins burst beneath their skin.

Only one man does Vader keep alive—the one who had been holding the Princess’s head. Vader crosses the cell to him and, grabbing him by the throat, lifts him into the air. The man struggles and strangles, scrabbling ineffectually at Vader’s prosthetic wrist. Vader only tightens his grip, and the man’s eyes widen in terror and pain.

“Tell me,” Vader intones, “who sent you.”

“No one,” the young officer says.

“I find the timing too perfect to be coincidental,” says Vader, and once more he tightens his hold on the man’s throat. “Tarkin discovers that she lied, and within an hour she is being tortured once again?”

“What—” the man gasps, before his words are lost to a gurgle as he chokes.

“Who sent you?” Vader asks again. “I may yet let you live, if only you tell me what I wish to know.”

But the young officer does not speak. Only rattles his last breath into the eerie stillness of the cell, then falls limp in Vader’s hold.

Vader sighs and casts the corpse aside. He turns to the young Princess. She is kneeling, naked and bruised and bloodied, on the cell floor. Her dress is neatly folded on the bench beside Vader, her boots sitting in a neat row beside it. It would seem whoever had orchestrated this assault had not intended for anyone else to know about it.

“Can you stand?” Vader asks. He walks over to the girl, halting above her. She looks up, up, up at him, and snarls a warning.

“I said,” says Vader, “can you stand?”

“Of course I can,” the Princess spits. She staggers, but stand she does, lifting her head high in spite of the white drying on her chin and between her feet, the red smeared on her thighs and buttocks. Her eyes are fierce and defiant, burning brown and black and somewhere, somehow, beneath it all, gold.

Vader motions for her to dress, and watches as she stumbles over to the bench and her clothes. She picks them up with hands that tremble more than Vader suspects she wishes, and pulls the sheer cloth of her dress over her head. It falls around her shoulders, covering the bite marks on her breasts and the claw marks on her shoulders and stomach, hiding the red and the white from view. She pulls her boots on next, sitting on the bench to do so—and when she is done, she straightens once more.

“Come,” says Vader, and he leads the way out of the cell.

They had brought her to a secondary, larger cell further down the detention block—to a place where they all could fit, where they all could partake in the fun. Doing so, however, had a secondary function as well; it would ensure that no one would smell it on the air when they came in to attend to the Princess next, either to feed her or to collect her for another meeting with himself or Tarkin.

Tarkin.

The name leaves a sour taste in Vader’s mind and between his thoughts. He has his suspicions, but as yet they are unfounded and unproven. He dares not act on his suspicions—not until he knows with certainty who was to blame for the Princess’s rape.

She collapses halfway back to her own cell.

Vader hears her body it the floor—feels it in the Force, an echo of the screams that had led him to her in the first place—and turns. She is half-unconscious and limp, and though she claws at the floor, she is unable to force her body to obey her silent commands.

She remains on the floor until Vader kneels and scoops her up into his arms. There is a moment—a second, an instant, a mechanical breath—where, as Vader lifts her and cradles her against his chest, it feels as if everything in the world has been made whole. For a second, an instant, a mechanical breath, he is—

He shoves those thoughts away. They are foolish and unfounded. His daughter died long ago, and even if she had not died with the woman whose name he will not utter, will not even think, he would never have lifted her from the floor of a detention cell, the smell of rape still heavy about her body and soul. He would never have allowed such a thing to happen to her, if she had lived. He would never have done the things to his daughter that he had done to Leia Organa.

No, it was better to not even think of the possibilities, of the what-if’s, of the ways in which the Force _screamed_ at him, begged him to take heed, whispered promises and vague shadows of a future he had long ago denied himself.

No, it is far better to block out the sound of the Force’s shrieks, and to carry the Princess back to her cell without another thought or feeling.

The door to her cell opens at a flick of Vader’s fingers, and he crosses the threshold and into the small, cramped cell. It still stinks of antiseptic and cleanser, and Vader’s mechanical lungs spasm at the sharp, acrid aftertaste of the chemicals.

Vader deposits the Princess on the bench at the back of the cell, then straightens and prepares to leave. He has just turned when he hears her voice from behind him, softer than he had expected, weaker than he had dreamed, but still filled with ferocity and flame.

“Why?”

Vader turns back to her. Her eyes are open and upon him, and for a second, an instant, a single, mechanical breath, it feels as if _her_ eyes are upon him once more.

“What?” Vader asks, shaking himself out of his stupor.

“Why?” the Princess asks again.

“Why what?”

“Why did you save me? Why did you stop it? Why are you being so…so _gentle_ after…everything.”

“I do not condone rape,” Vader says.

The Princess’s brows pull down over her eyes, but she looks thoughtful more than angry. “They said it was you,” the Princess murmurs, as much to herself as to him. “They said “he sends his regards”, and I thought…” She chokes, and it seems she cannot force the words past her teeth.

“It was not,” says Vader bluntly. And again, “I do not condone rape.”

“Why?” the Princess asks.

Vader considers. “Because,” he says slowly—and for the sake of the woman who stares out of this girl’s eyes, he says, “there was a woman I once loved who was harmed in such a way by many. I will never forgive those who did so to her—and neither will I forgive those who do so to another now.”

“Oh.”

The Princess is silent.

“Sleep,” says Vader. “The morning will come soon enough, and with it, your execution.”

“Hm,” says the Princess.

Vader lifts a hand, and for the sake of what he had just told her, he presses into her mind and says, again, “Sleep.”

She resists him. Just as she had resisted him for days against his mind probe, she resists his attempts to sway her into sleep. She fights him, tooth and nail and scream, until Vader withdraws, a headache forming behind his eyes.

“Very well,” Vader says calmly, though he is quietly irritated. He silently chides himself for his momentary weakness—she is not the woman who he had seen in her eyes; she is the Princess of Alderaan, the youngest Senator to ever be elected, a Rebel, and she will not bow before Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith—and he turns and strides out through the door.

The door slides shut behind him, cutting off the sight of the Princess’s dark, dark eyes watching him. The woman’s eyes, whom he will not name.

 _Now_ , he thinks, _I will go pay a visit to Tarkin_.

**Author's Note:**

> What did you think? Comment and let me know!


End file.
